> 6 tons of wheat 6000 kg of wheat Why not 6 Mg of wheat?
Because clearly nobody would understand it.
Common mistakes when using the metric system
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#62So, when using the kelvin temperature scale, it's lower case when using "kelvin", but uppercase when using the abbreviation "K"? That annoys me as kelvin is a name and even my phone wants to capitalise it.
I disagree with that rule. I get that people spell liter, gram, meter in lower case, but units based on names of historic persons like Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Pascal and Kelvin deserve to be capitalized.
Capitalisation isn't universal. Languages like German capitalise every noun, so from a German perspective, Gram, Metre, and Litre should all be capitalised and it's the English that are wrong for using lowercase units.
Meanwhile, English capitalises stuff that other languages don't, like the names of languages, times (days and such), and for some reason "I". By the time the metric system was conceived, English still capitalised most nouns (just look at the US constitution for example) after very recently coming into contact with the concept of capital letters in the first place, something copied from German printing presses.
And then there are the many languages that don't even have capitals, which will probably question why there are two ways to write every letter when they first learn languages with a Latin alphabet.
Nothing "deserves" to be capitalised, every language just decided to stick to some arbitrary rules. There's no good reason why `Monday` is more important than `website`, or why `I` is more important than `you`.
Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#63I was surprised to see "L" as the "only correct" (though as minor mistake) abbreviation for a liter, being certain "l" or "ℓ" is the way to go, as that's how I was taught so far. Turns out that SI actually allows both "l" and "L", but I would only ever use the uppercase if it's a sans-serif font in a non-prefixed unit ("L" as opposed to "ml"). I've never seen any can or bottle using "mL" or "cL". Some of the examples…
I live in metric land (Sweden), and I have never seen "gr." for grams and honestly I would probably take a while to understand what it meant.
Here in Italy is more common than any other form, I'd say
Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#64Lots of these are country dependent in terms of what is familiar to people. To some degree that matters if your primary communication is not international but domestic. For e.g. in the UK sqm is very common, particularly when looking at property. On RightMove which is the most popular property website here, for e.g. you can see here that the default is `sq ft` with `sq m` given underneath: https://www.rightmove.co.uk…
> I think the things chosen are a bit strange. I've never seen anyone write '15070 grams', it'd almost always be given as 1.507 kilograms.
I'm sure it's just a typo, but 15,000 grams is 15 kilograms. So: 15.07 kg.
I don't think they arrived at some of the more extreme examples by accident, but I could only speculate on the intent behind them.
Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#65Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#66I thought this looked like good advice until I got to: > Mass/weight distinction > Incorrect: He weighs 70 kg; Correct: His mass is 70 kg > Incorrect: She weighs 50 kg; Correct: She weighs 490 N on Earth Really?! We’re not supposed to use kilograms to describe a person’s weight? And to describe someone’s weight, we have to use newtons and specify what planet they’re on? Good luck enforcing those rules.
There's a 5% range when converting mass into weight (depends on where on Earth you are). Santa loses a few kilos when he comes down to the equator. It's not enough for people to care, but it can be important if you're building something that needs to carry a lot of weight.
This is a very important distinction to make in scientific papers. Completely meaningless for most writing. If anything, physicists got the definition for the word "weight" wrong and patched up their mistake by adding the concept of "mass". Most mass is measured standing still on earth, so "weight" is fine unless you need to be precise.
Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#67The most common error I see is "kph" which doesn't even have any possible meaning. 'kilos per hour' would in most places be taken as "kilograms per hour". As in "my weight increases by 3 kph when I visit McDonalds"
kph seems to come from people that normally work in miles but switched to metric for one reason or another. The common notation I almost always see for kilometres per hour would be km/h, in rare occasions with `h` exchange for whatever letter the local translation of "hour" starts with. I don't think anyone would confuse kph for kilograms per hour (after all, that would be kgph or kg/h, and I don't think I've ever ha…
There's no confusion, the problem is simply that seeing "kph" automatically expands to "kilos per hour" in non- native English brains. That's overridden by logic, obviously, but that jarring effect is always there.
Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#68I was surprised to see "L" as the "only correct" (though as minor mistake) abbreviation for a liter, being certain "l" or "ℓ" is the way to go, as that's how I was taught so far. Turns out that SI actually allows both "l" and "L", but I would only ever use the uppercase if it's a sans-serif font in a non-prefixed unit ("L" as opposed to "ml"). I've never seen any can or bottle using "mL" or "cL". Some of the examples…
I live in metric land (Sweden), and I have never seen "gr." for grams and honestly I would probably take a while to understand what it meant.
In ex-Yugoslavia countries using gr (usually without a dot) for grams used to be a fairly common thing. Last few decades as EU standardization takes place it's a lot rarer to see. Also in Croatia in everyday life people will far more often use decagrams (10g), shorten colloquially as 'deka', than grams - which leads to even more confusion because the SI abbreviation for decagrams is dag, not dg (which is decigram, 0.1g), and it's often mixed - even some primary school books had these typos.
Re: Common mistakes when using the metric system
#69few notes:
- "Fuel consumption of 9.4 L / 100 km" is not "the right form" is a modern take, a more classic and still valid SI one is km/l which is very similar to "Fuel consumption of 9.4 LPK";
- "25 {kW/h,kW⋅h} to boil a tank of water" are both strange forms, kWh is the common accepted way to express energy, no center dot multiplication needed;
- multiple prefix (vs power-of-10) and bare prefix are as well commonly accepted, I see no reasons to consider them wrong, while I can state formally wrong "2 kilograms of rice" because we do not measure the mass but the weight so it should be 1.961daN where deca-newtons are commonly used because 1 daN is roughly 1kgf commonly shortened to 1kg as we can commoly count 1kg[f] == 1 daN... For instance climbing equipment in the EU use daN to express maximum loads of connectors, ropes etc because of that;
- multiple quantities much depend on industry and conciseness, as we do not write units in table values but only in headers we tend not to write them three times in a row where from the context is clear what numbers means.
The biggest issue is makes habits changes. Actually we should not use km/h as well, since for SI base unites are m/s, but 3.6 is not an easy conversion like kgf/daN, so in the EU we keep using km/h, something meaningful in the past, when we go by horses and feet, but not much needed today.
Not to count software, where often recognize "°C" (two chars) BUT not ℃ (U+2103) and so on.